The New Yorker vs. ‘Descriptivist’ Linguists

By Christopher Shea

Two New Yorker writers recently inveighed against the school of linguistics called “descriptivism” (which, to be honest, is pretty much all of linguistics, unless you consider the retired guy who writes in to the newspaper complaining about sentences that start with “And” to be a linguist). Descriptivists prefer to, as the name might suggest, describe the ways in which people use certain words and locutions, rather than write “vulgar” or “incorrect” in the margins, in red pen, whenever they come across “hopefully” used as a synonym for “it is to be hoped.”

Both writers, Joan Acocella and Ryan Bloom, think they can blow apart the descriptivist position by making a simple observation: In descriptivists’ own prose, they follow the rules! Bloom writes, rather heatedly, “Ensconced behind a mask of noble ends, something obscenely disingenuous is happening here. How easy it is for a person who is already part of the linguistic élite to tell others who are not that they don’t need to be.”

Actual linguists and lexicographers who answer to the “descriptivist” label tend to be quite concerned with precisely those matters Bloom claims that they neglect. Is a particular linguistic form considered to be erroneous? If so, what motivates the ascription of error? Would the person who produced the form in question recognize it as an error and chalk it up to a slip of the tongue or pen? Or is a linguistic variant disparaged because it is associated with a stigmatized dialect, and if so, how does the relationship between the “standard” and “non-standard” forms reflect broader social dynamics over time? And finally, which registers of a language are appropriate for which social situations, and how do speakers and writers navigate changes of register in their daily lives?

In other words, the situational real-world usage of language forms is not something pooh-poohed by descriptivists, because that variability is an essential part of describing language.

In response to criticism, Bloom posts an “Update” [scroll down] that pretty much nullifies the post.* While the original purported to expose the descriptivists’ “dirty little secret,” now he writes that both linguistic description and knowledge of situational rules are important; and, what’s more, his own argument ”lines up perfectly well with descriptive beliefs.” Okay, then!

*P.S. 5/31 I’ve just learned, from an incoming Language Log link [see the update and subsequent comments], that Ryan Bloom or someone else at the New Yorker thought better of the update I mentioned — and pulled it from the web! A curious editorial decision, and kind of unsporting. I usually clip and save the web pages I link to, but failed to in this case. But the following reconstruction of the update, from Language Log, seems correct to me:

The point of this post is neither to dismiss modern linguistics as a whole nor to create an either/or argument. The brevity of the post allows only for a simplified message: while one should be able to utilize natural dialects (or registers), there are also practical reasons for learning “grade-school rules” and knowing when to apply them. Both ideas are important, neither incorrect. This is an argument that lines up perfectly well with descriptive beliefs. That said, there is certainly a difference between the scholarly aims of the larger discipline of descriptive linguistics—an incredibly valuable, complex field—and the nit-picking displayed in certain mainstream essays that promote extreme descriptive values while simultaneously demonizing the prescriptive “rules.” It should be made clear that the term “descriptive” as used above refers to this latter group.